


Los Angelitos de El Generico

by Cezet



Category: Professional Wrestling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-30 21:55:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15105641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cezet/pseuds/Cezet
Summary: Mithen asked in her latest essay for us to make Los Angelitos de El Generico real and vivid and true in our minds.  I tend to be a bit literal, but I've done my best.





	Los Angelitos de El Generico

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mithen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/gifts).



If you go into the closest town and ask where to find Los Angelitos de El Generico, people will immediately view you with suspicion.  They’re protective, you see, and want to be certain you’re a good person before they’ll help you.  If you pass muster, the directions you’re given will lead you far out of town and even farther down a dusty dirt road that looks like you’re just driving off into the desert someplace south of Tijuana, Mexico.

Eventually, though, in the distance you’ll see a two-story building come into view.  As you get closer, you’ll see a very small outbuilding behind it.  Closer still and the dusty white of the building begins to show and the reddish-brown clay roof tiles, their barrel shapes overlapping each other. Eventually, there’s a rickety-looking, hand-painted wooden sign with “Los Angelitos de El Generico” painted on it.  The “e” and “s” in “Angelitos” are painted adorably backwards. 

There’s no real parking area, so to speak, so you’d probably just drive up to the house itself.  The two stories are white, as you could make out from further away.  Each of the windows has a thick wooden trim and the wide porch has rough-hewn wooden columns holding up the roof.  The glass in many of the window panes is old and wavy-looking, but other panes look very new.  There’s a hammock hanging on one end of the porch and a couple of rustic-looking chairs.  In your mind’s eye, you can see a man, pale, wearing wrestling tights and boots with a luchador mask lying in the hammock playing with a pudgy baby, blowing on the child’s belly while the child laughs uproariously.  Images come to you of other children playing on the porch while older children run in some improvised version of tag, shouting and laughing through the front yard.

The door is painted blue.   When you open the door, there’s an entry way.  The walls are plaster and painted white.  Immediately in front of you is a highly-polished wooden staircase to the second floor.  You step onto a brightly colored, braided rag rug over the reddish terra cotta floor tiles.  It smells like WARM and SUNSHINE and wood and wax and HOME.  You smile a little at your own flight of fancy.

To your immediate left is a doorway with a very large door set with many panes of the same old-fashioned wavy glass.  You glimpse rows of wooden desks and a rolling chalkboard.  You just catch the edge of a faded globe.  This time, the image is of little dark-haired girls and boys sitting in the desks, paying rapt attention to an elderly woman, a retired teacher who comes out twice a week to hold lessons for them, you imagine.  The walls are papered with taped-up children’s drawings.  The large rag rug at the back of the room near the small half-filled bookshelf looks like a great place for a masked wrestler to lie and listen to children of different ages practice their reading aloud, paying attention and nodding along with a smile. 

To your right, is an open doorway, framed in the same polished wood.  Looking in, you see another hand-made rug, a small coffee table and an old, but comfy-looking faded green couch.  The drapes are cream with blue and red stripes.  The walls are butter yellow.  It should be jarring, but it isn’t.  You immediately know that this area is kept extra nice for visitors.  Visitors who might adopt children or donate.  Tradesmen who come to donate their time and skills are asked to sit and have a bit of pan dulce or a slice of an unusual cake the man in the wrestling mask calls “basbousa” as he licks his lips and rubs his belly comically.  Many of those tradesmen take older boys as unofficial apprentices, teaching them their trade to provide both help around the house and skills to support them in their futures.  You don’t even question why you are imagining these things anymore.  In a strange combination of fugue and whimsy, you continue through the parlour via another open doorway leading further into the house. 

Here is a dining room.  The large table is well-worn and polished with an assortment of rough benches and mis-matched chairs surrounding it.  The chair at the head of the table, wedged up against the sideboard, has three high-chairs of various sizes assembled around it.  A somewhat larger wooden chair is tucked into the foot of the table.  You stand and stare at it for a few moments, hearing in your mind echoes of chairs scraping against the floor, giggling children and utensils against plates.  Another open doorway takes you into a large kitchen with many pots and pans hanging on the walls.  The deep ceramic double-sink is under a window that looks out on the back yard.  Under the window you know there’s a pump for the well where the children wash up before dinner.  You can nearly see the children weeding the large vegetable garden or playing kickball in the vast open space.  And there at the side are the strange plants that don’t grow anywhere else around the area.  You found them in a plant encyclopedia at the library once when you were in town.  Salsola Vemiculata, commonly Mediterranean saltwort, though this place was nowhere near the Mediterranean.

The edge of the outbuilding is visible and you know there’s an ancient pick-up truck parked inside it, just in case of emergencies, like the time little Lucia tripped off the porch and her head just wouldn’t stop bleeding.  You remember holding her in the bathroom next to the kitchen while the man in the wrestling mask cleaned her up.  You don’t go look at the bathroom off the kitchen.  You know what it looks like.  The pick-up took Lucia into town to get stitches at the small doctor’s office.  Still, you look into the empty back yard with visions of the masked luchador, now wearing a red and gold cape “flying” the littlest children around the yard or tying the cape around the shoulders of the slightly larger ones to give them piggyback rides.  Your hands itch to be washing dishes.  Your ears strain for the laughter and shouts of joy.

You walk out the other kitchen doorway having made a full circle back into the foyer and find yourself climbing the polished wooden stairs.  Upstairs are the three large bedrooms, painted soft purple and green and blue and pink and orange on various walls.  Like the parlour, it shouldn’t work but does.  The rooms are clean with mismatched beds covered in crazy quilts and heavy old wooden dressers.  You know if you open any dresser drawer, there will be clean, but faded and mended clothing in various children’s sizes.  Off the larger of the three bedrooms, the one with the rocking chair with the chipped white paint, is an even smaller room.  Perhaps it was meant to be a nursery with its direct and sole access being from the bedroom.  An easy place to hear a child cry, even in the night.  It is so small that the double-bed, itself looking like it could only fit two adults if they were very friendly, dominates the tiny space.  The curtains here are the most mismatched of all the rooms, but they make you smile.

You walk out of the room, back down the stairs and out the front door.  When you get to your car, you turn to take one last look at the building that has made you feel so strange.  As you do, the masked luchador walks out the door onto the porch and calls “KEVIN!!” with more joy than you’ve ever heard your name pronounced.  He hugs you tight as you stumble back onto the porch and leads you inside.  The children are in the classroom for their lessons.  It smells like WARM and SUNSHINE and HOME.

**Author's Note:**

> This is El Generico's Heaven. Kevin was always there, because it wouldn't be heaven for El Generico if he wasn't. In this piece, Kevin's whole soul was finally integrating into this heaven. Thus, they are able to be together eternally taking care of the orphans. I brought the teacher in so Mithen and some other friends on Twitter who are teachers or who, at least, have taught me a lot, could visit regularly.


End file.
